Everything is set on a dedicated server (no cpanel, overcomplicated panels – just pure lamp on centos without even email or DNS; we use godaddy and google for those 2 things).

The server is a quad core with 8Gb of RAM and properly tunned for performance with apc-cache and the only thing we are hosting is a magento install for all those 40 domains (shops).

We haven’t added any plugins/features to magento. It’s basically the out of box thing, with a very simple theme added to it.

We have tried all kind of performance tuning and this the best we achieved.

I must admit if people are just browsing the website, it loads very quickly. But the problem is when we update products and orders. It takes about 2 minutes to save a product and it eats 120% of the CPU and 10% from the memory.

Our products are scrapped from other websites, so we need to do regular product updates and let me just tell you that using the dataflow is the fastest way to import products, but even that takes about 1 hour and 10 minutes to process 500 products. So when we have to do batch updates for 11,000 we have to wait endless hours.

If you’re thinking about using magento for your shop, it’s ok, but make sure to have a dedicated server and don’t even try to have more than 10,000 products or a multi-shop. It just doesn’t work.

MAGENTO is simply NOT scalable in performance.

Lessons learned:
1. Had to triple to the hardware to have load time less than 10sec per page. Joomla virtuamart run fast on on a single core zeon with 4Gb of ram, Now I run on dual quad cores with 16Gb of ram and max out cpu / disk io at each newsletter send.

2. Virtuamart was not perfect – but once it was fixed it run with no admin / coding for months at a end. Magento keeps on crashing out of the blue, with random error messages which are hard to reproduce.

3. No easy upgrades – expect to spend many late nights fixing failed upgrade scripts and restoring database dumps.

4. Magento has a lots of cool features, but they come at a price, we lost nearly 30% in sales after [upgrading] to Magento.

In the end, its the number of sales not the amount of widgets that keeps you going.

If you like to tinker with php and xml and / or have the money to sign up for Enterprise, Magento comes highly recommend.

If you would like to have something stable / fast / reliable; Magento is not for you.

I do agree that if a company is selling a product, which Instince, the makers of WP e-commerce are selling commercial versions, then they should make those changes themselves and push it live. Without reading the context of what you read, they might have been giving the changes in the code for someone who needed immediate help with an issue in which they had worked on in their next release, which is in beta right now, so it might have been an issue of not being able to push an update with one small change.

No matter which e-commerce solution you choose, there’s sure to be some quirk about it, whether it is missing some awesome feature you discovered you needed, or whether the support is lacking. Good luck in your search for the perfect e-commerce solution.

I use wordpress for many sites and was tempted to evaluate the WP Ecommerce Plugin you linked to, but after looking at their forums, I am now very skeptical. The creators of that Plugin are posting code on their forums in response to people reporting bugs and issues, and asking the poster to update the plugin code. This is completely unacceptable from a Product / Service entity, because the whole reason that an average person is buying a software or product is because they don’t have the time and/or the skills to do it themselves. Especially give that this product is expected to address payment processing and security !
Thanks again for your valuable referrals.

A few good free or low-cost solutions that can be integrated with popular CMS solutions and self hosted include WP E-Commerce plugin for Wordpress, Ubercart which integrates well with Drupal. Externaly hosted solutions you might like include Shopify or Goodbarry CMS and shopping cart. Also consider which payment gateways your options are with each. Your client will also want to use a payment gateway which charges a low, but fair processing fee. Some gateways are more and some less.

Soooo can someone please list out ALTERNATIVES to Magento? I really do not mind paying for e-commerce software, as long as it has the basic shopping cart features, payment gateways and is relatively easy to skin/theme. Having the hardest time locating an ecommerce software that people like. Please let me know!

I have worked with many php based applications and never have I had issues with speed like this. I can make changes to the environment at will but right now I am trying to implement fastCGI as I have ran out of all other options. Gzip conpression, Eaccelerator, javascript compression, magento’s native cacheing, etc. etc. etc. I have tried everything that usually results in improvements for any other PHP app I have used to no avail in magento.

The thing is HEAVY on javascript to the point that no matter how fast you serve it end users can still have speed issues. It’s also concerning that in this 5 page thread http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/14860/ started in august of last year the most frequent solution is to drop $$$ on dedicated hosting. Even some of the dedicated hosts (that get plugged every time someone is having speed issues) fail to serve the cart up on times that compare with other open source carts.

Unless magento puts speed 1st and foremost on it’s requirements and starts developing with speed in mind, I think they are going to fall by the wayside. Do they really believe that demanding high dollar environments to get reasonable speeds will continue to make magento better or extend the user/developer base?

People choose open source apps for a reason, #1 being cost savings. If they get a free product that is free yet is going to cost them three figures a month to maintain how attractive is it?

So you want a flexible e-commerce platform for free (open-source) and not only can you not figure it out by taking some of your precious time to analyze it, but you dare bash the hard work of dozens of developers more qualified than yourselves. And if that’s not enough, you insinuate that it’s a ‘clever’ way on Irubin Consulting’s part, who has invested the capital to grow the project, to make some money?

Last I checked, MySQL, which has been forever a sub-par DB solution, sold for well over $4 billion. Try their forums to get an answer on anything, see what you get. Guess they weren’t in it for the money.

The web does not belong to the common of the mortals. It’s a programmer’s world – if you don’t want in, go home. That also goes for so-called “front-end” developers. Markup and CSS are but the frame that holds the picture, programmers paint the picture. Get a clue.

Lastly, anyone of you ever spend some time with osCommerce’s codebase? Pah-leeze.

I would agree with many of the comments above it’s too big, too slow, using Magento Connect to upgrade can kill the installation (use SSH or just don’t upgrade).

Skinning a site just takes a bit of practice (lots of Google) and time – it’s when you come to actually try and add some code in that things get hard.

Whilst osCommerce, ZenCart, ProductCart etc etc can be worked on by just editing a single file Magento makes things trickier by requiring that you edit a hierarchy of files and bug hunting through them can be a nightmare. From a developer’s point of view it takes hours to code in a function that you would expect to do in minutes – in my book that is not a good way to make money if on a fixed price contract.

Having said that if you keep at it some things (like the built in SQL queries) start to make sense and things pick up – the total lack of up to date, decent documentation does not help.

Be very wary when writing your own modules that updates to the store may ‘break’ them as Irubin do not shy away from changing variable names in updates and, if you are relying on the old name?

Finally – one or two folks above have queried the true ‘Open Source’ credentials of Magento and the motivation of Irubin Consulting in releasing it. Having read extensively through the Magento Forums and seen the responses (and lack of same) from the development team then I have to agree with them – in my book this is a vehicle for Irubin to make money (hats off to them – it’s a brilliant bit of programming and represents thousands of hours of work)and, as a business model, it’s pretty clever.

But that said, I’m not expert but I have used a couple other open source carts in the past, and I think the general rule is: “expect bugs and troubles”. So far, everything has worked as it should in Magento, and that’s already put it far above other projects.

I wonder, I see all these complaints, but where’s the link to this magic open source free shopping cart system that is easy to use and configure? For now, I don’t think there is one.